Franchise Lead Generation: Grow Leads Without Portals & Broker Networks

Developing a franchise from a few locations to an international powerhouse doesn’t happen overnight. Across industries, franchise development teams leverage every channel possible to generate quality leads efficiently. Grow your franchise sustainably with a comprehensive approach that doesn’t rely entirely on expensive franchise portals and outsourced franchise sales; here’s how to make it happen.

How to Generate Leads for Franchises

Franchise sales start with research, not pitch decks. Whether franchise system development is handled at the brand or enterprise level, the responsible team should always question existing assumptions about their ideal audience. Before rolling out a high-budget PPC campaign or loads of organic content, do your homework:

• Check your demographics: Determine the ideal age range for prospects, which could vary widely depending on the industry. For example, the craft workers and technicians in HVAC, electrical, and other home services are nearing retirement age; those owners are more likely to sell their existing business into franchise systems.
• Explore motivation: Survey existing and prospective franchisees about their motivations. Why did they start their business? What would make them sell? For many, financial freedom, community connection, and supported independence are big reasons small business owners love what they do. These motivators impact your messaging and value propositions.
• Scout the competition: Determine how active competing franchisors are in specific markets, cities, or neighborhoods. Younger franchisors may tend to discover growth in small cities with less competition, lower barriers to entry, and more affordable real estate.

All this information has value beyond winning franchise leads. Understanding who your audience is, what motivates their decision-making, and where they’re best positioned to succeed can make your entire franchise system more knowledgeable and supportive.

Three Proven Franchise Lead Generation Strategies

Armed with a little data, it’s time to focus on franchise sales. Lead generation should utilize as many marketing channels as you can confidently manage – and if there’s a skill gap or bandwidth shortage, let us know.

1. Win Franchise Leads with Content Marketing

Content marketing is a long-term, impactful way to educate, motivate, and attract quality franchise leads and position your brand competitively against industry rivals. Content marketing is an encompassing term that covers a few specific tactics, including:

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Start with competitive keyword research to determine how to optimize and expand your website content and rank above your competitors for relevant keywords. Use portals like Franchise Gator as “competitors” in this research too, as these sites are excellent at content marketing that claims space in search engine results. Consider how different keywords align with parts of the sales funnel, and gear your content toward users in that stage.

For example, a keyword like “landscaping franchise success rate” is very top-of-funnel and research-oriented. In contrast, “landscaping franchise opportunities” is lower-funnel and indicates an intent to convert. Your strategy may be to write a blog that targets the former keyword in a helpful, non-sales-oriented manner. Then write an evergreen “franchise opportunity” page to target the latter keyword, focusing on your franchise’s differentiators and helping the user self-qualify.

Video marketing

Video is a powerful way to deliver information in an engaging, entertaining way. Investing in a robust video library allows brands to reach over 2.5 billion monthly active users on YouTube, create attention-grabbing social media posts, and position video content on franchise development websites to attract the right franchise leads.

Social media

Having a consistent, professional presence on LinkedIn, Instagram, and other relevant social media platforms puts your brand where people spend time—more than two hours per day, on average.

2. Gather Clean Data

Sometimes the difference between a successful lead generation campaign and a total bust is the accuracy of your tracking. Tools like Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, Salesforce, and others offer plenty of opportunities to gather granular data but equal opportunities to make mistakes: duplicated conversions, missing events, or other faulty tracking. Invest in a tracking and analytics audit to know your reporting is accurate.

3. Leverage Paid Media

A well-run PPC campaign can deliver exceptional results, especially with click-grabbing creative and clever copy. While Google Ads expertise is key, some of the biggest differentiators live on the landing page. A little conversion rate optimization (CRO) with A/B testing can unearth important findings that win more conversions and inform broader messaging. For example, in our CRO project for Real Property Management, we found that:

• Men preferred terms like “top” and “#1” in ad copy
• Women preferred terms like “opportunity,” “how to,” and “finance”

Don’t Rely on Franchise Portals & Broker Networks

Why You Shouldn’t Buy Franchise Leads

The problems with franchise lead portals and franchise lead generation companies are that they rank for many broad, top-of-funnel keywords with their content, and any email lists or targeting methods are often too broad. These websites boast big traffic numbers, but in many cases, these sessions aren’t from prospective franchisees with $250,000 burning a hole in their pockets. Users might dream about owning their own Subway or Jiffy Lube, but this doesn’t mean they are qualified to make those dreams a reality right away.

We’re also big believers in investing in your own platforms, specifically your website and CRM. Franchise portal sites are just inflexible business listings. They don’t let you test and refine messaging and design to maximize conversions; you get only surface-level metrics, and you can’t take that data with you either.

Have You Talked to Your Sales Team Today?

We’re honestly baffled by how often we hear from our clients that “marketing and sales don’t talk.” You need a clear picture of how qualified your leads are and which persona is most likely to buy. Both teams benefit from shared insights about shifts in market sentiment and data earned and learned online and outside. 

Take the time to audit your marketing and sales operations to improve processes and discover gaps in where and how you work.

These are some of the questions you’ll want to ask yourself during this audit:

• Do marketing and sales use different CRMs or different features of the same CRM? Can you connect them, or do you need to change how you use this technology?
• Do you have full visibility of the sales funnel, from the time a prospective franchise lead comes in through a paid ad (for example) until the moment they ink their agreement? What’s missing, and why?
• How is lead quality being scored? Can this be partially automated for better consistency?
• Is there a discrepancy between the marketing messaging and the sales messaging? When a lead transitions from marketing to sales, do their expectations continue to be met?
• Have you set benchmarks and KPIs that everyone agrees on?
• Are you tracking the right events in your data and analytics platform? Where are the knowledge gaps in the behaviors users display?

Put in a little extra time to outline – in clear, bottom-line numbers – how much money the company is spending, (and wasting) on inefficient processes and platforms, and you’ll grab their attention.

The Best Franchise Leads Are Free

Converting franchise leads is a whole lot easier when you’re winning inquiries from quality prospects. We know exactly who you’re looking for; Oneupweb has supported franchise organizations for decades. Work with an experienced team of marketing professionals who know franchising inside and out. Ready to grow? Let’s go. Get in touch or give us a call at 231-922-9977 today.